Monologues for men | "My Dad's so Uncool it's Cool" by Gabriel Davis

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My grown daughter has sent me here with this voucher to get my tattoo removed. A “birthday” present she calls it. She thinks my tattoo is … This song … this song that’s playing … ! Oh, never mind … for a moment I thought it was a different song … I’m sure this is a fine song but …

You know a great song when you hear it. You hear such songs and suddenly you’re filled with joy or sadness or lust or rage or love. What is it about such a song? Its power to plumb the depths of our primal feeling. To call vivid flashes of sense and memory, to color our thought, alter the rhythm of breath, the beating of a heart?

A song can transform the world. It can set us free and bring down the walls that divide us.

For me growing up in East Berlin that song was “Looking for Freedom” sung by the incomparable David Hasselhoff. Before it reached #1 here on our charts, I heard it and I could not unhear it.

It haunted me, possessing my voice in the shower. I’d find myself compelled to sing it - loud as I could - and my girlfriend, often in there with me, she says “Otto, my ears are bleeding, please, please won’t you stop.” But I could not stop. I tell her, “Today your ears may bleed, but soon it will be your heart that bleeds as mine does for unity with West Germany. And she gives me that look that she gives me. But then she begins to sing it too.

We’re so loud together singing it that our neighbor, the old man in the next apartment, begins banging on the door telling us to shut up or he’ll call the police. I run out of the shower, throw a towel on, and I open the door still singing and my neighbor is horrified. But when I explain to him why I sing, and then my girlfriend also runs out without a towel on … then he understands, or at least he’s excited, and he begins singing too.

This song made me, my girlfriend, this old man feel things we hadn’t felt for so very long. For my girlfriend and I, that feeling was hope. For the old man, it was probably hope. And soon it wasn’t just us singing Hasselhoff’s harmony of hope. Everywhere you went in East Berlin, people were singing it. It played on the radio day and night. It became our anthem.

And when the East German government announced that we would be allowed to freely cross the wall, I heard the news as if delivered to me by the baleful baritone of Hasselhoff himself.

New years eve, 1989. I stand with my brethren at the crumbled wall, East and West together. And there he is. Hasselhoff in a crane hoisted above the crowd. A god in the machine. My girlfriend and I grip hands tightly. The old man grips my girlfriend’s hand tightly. I feel strange about it, but more than anything just pure, powerful joy.

And then he begins to sing the anthem “Looking for Freedom.” Many of us are crying, because we know that we have found it. We know the Americans laugh at him. They do not understand like we do this beautiful man, his perfect brown curling locks, his soulful melodic ways. But we do. We watch transfixed as he sings, moving about excitedly in his cool leather Jacket. A jacket so awesome it has flashing lights on it.

For we, we the formerly oppressed can watch such a sight without any irony, without any, what you now call “snark”. We are not “snarky” we are free.

Twenty years later, I look back on that moment, and I do not feel ashamed that I adored this man. I do not apologize for the way he moved us all.

My daughter and her American husband can laugh at it if they want. But I lived it. And, yes, I have the tattoo to prove it. I wear it on my breast right here. I wear Hasselhoff with pride.

That is why … I am ripping up this voucher. And I am leaving.

This video is totally awesome ... watch and learn people. This is how you make your mark on history.

For those actors who wish to research the "given circumstances" of the monologue above ... imagine yourself as the monologist among this crowd, staring up at the incomparable and unhassleable Hoff. Also, um, have some class and research the fall of the Berlin wall.

This is serious stuff people. Joke though we may, the Hoff meant a lot to a lot of people at a very significant moment in history. I think that deserves a moment of silence ... that or you can just play the video and listen to the frickin' song already.